Join us for this week’s episode, Plan C Live: Economic Recovery from the Bottom Up.
A resilient community can use available resources to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations. A fast and flexible civic response to COVID-19 has demonstrated the need for communities to self-organize and connect people in groups to solve problems together. In this discussion, we look back at the COVID-19 response and ask what have we learned from organizing these efforts and how might we respond to problems in the future. What can government and industry learn from this bottom-up, widely distributed response? Join Dale Dougherty of Make Community and Dorothy Jones-Davis of nation of Makers along with the following panelists.
Date recorded: Thursday, September 3rd @ 4pm PT / 7pm ET
Find the Open Source Notes from the session here.
- Robert Read founded Public Invention in 2019, 35 years after first being inspired to do so by Buckminster Fuller. He is a professional computer programmer and manager, and amateur scientist, physicist, and mathematician, mycologist and electrical engineer. Read more about his work on open source ventilators here.
- Gui Cavalcanti is founder and co-CEO of Open Source Medical Supplies. He has been leading teams designing high performance hydraulic and pneumatic robots for the past 12 years, most recently as founder of Breeze Automation. He worked on several humanoid and quadrupedal legged robots at Boston Dynamics, and later cofounded and ran MegaBots, building 15-ton, 16 foot tall, 430 horsepower hydraulic humanoid combat robots. Gui is also founder of Artisan’s Asylum, a thriving makerspace in Somerville, MA.
- Karen Cornish is a maker, educator and small farmer with a natural dye plants nursery business and the Project Director for Artisan’s Asylum PPE Gowns Initiative, where she has been working to engage local community volunteers (now 160+ strong!), as well as to hire new Americans and formerly incarcerated persons recruited through the City of Boston and other partners. Together this team cuts, assembles, folds and packages gowns that are shipped to places in need around the country.
- Sarah Miller is an industrial designer based in Boston, MA who has organized the design and production of gowns. Read more about her work on PPE production and distribution with Artisan’s Asylum here.
- Vi Ha is a librarian in the Science, Technology & Patents Department at the Los Angeles Public Library and directs the Octavia Lab, a do-it-yourself studio space at the Central Library that converted to making PPE during the pandemic.
- Nathan Parker is an organizer in the maker movement for several years, working on developing the digital infrastructure necessary to integrate makers into a decentralized global supply chain capable of responding to the disasters that are coming, and the ones that are already here.
- Rachel “Crafty” Sadd is an artist and organizer as well as the Executive Director of Ace Makerspace in Oakland, CA, working on equity in maker culture and medium scale PPE projects for under-resourced communities.
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